Daring to be yourself
May's random rec: 'Stargirl', by Jerry Spinelli
320 Sycamore Studios publishes original kid stories served fresh monthly, plus essays, book recommendations, and postcards from Readerville. Everything is completely human-written.
A graduation-speech flop … or was it?
I gave a speech at my high school graduation and for years afterward, I beat myself up about it. It was lame, I told myself. Ineloquent. Uninspired. Hackneyed. I should have started writing it earlier. Practiced it more. I told myself I disappointed my parents and teachers and classmates.
Basically, I shoulded all over myself.
Two things. One, Who cares? Two, I actually have no idea if I let anybody down. I never asked, and it wasn’t like I got booed or anything. All that negativity was in my head. Pure projection. Come to think of it, maybe the speech wasn’t that bad. I’ll never know, really, because I don’t have a copy of it and all I can remember is the theme, Dare to be different.
And if that’s all I can remember — if that phrase lingers like an advertising slogan (Just do it! Be all you can be! Eat fresh!) — a person could do worse than Dare to be different.
The only tweak to the theme I’d make now is to change “different” to “yourself”.
‘Whose affection do you value more?’
I thought about all this as I re-read Jerry Spinelli’s “Stargirl”, a YA novel about a girl who is gloriously, unabashedly herself.
The story takes place in Arizona, at the fictional Mica Area High School. The student body, Spinelli writes, is
“not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity. There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. Even our dorks and nerds had a MAHS stamp on them. If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands.”
Stargirl Caraway lands at MAHS like a visitor from another planet. She serenades classmates on their birthdays, makes up songs about isosceles triangles, doesn’t wear makeup, greets people she doesn’t know (gasp!), disappears midrace during a cross-country meet, wears pioneer gowns and flapper dresses and kimonos to school, totes her pet rat to class, brings a flower (with vase) to set on her desk, laughs when there is no joke, dances when there is no music.
The student body is gobsmacked, repelled, captivated, curious. No one more than Leo, the story’s 11th grade narrator. Who is this new sophomore? Rumors abound. She’s a faculty plant for school spirit. She’s trying to get herself discovered for the movies. She’s an alien.
The story traces the arc of a school year, where the student body at first resists Stargirl, then embraces her, then shuns her, and finally ...
I’ll leave it for you to discover.
Leo and Stargirl tumble into love, but their romance is backdropped by the gravitational tug between originality and conformity. Leo is ultimately faced with a choice, offered to him in a Sonoran Desert-style Oracle of Delphi moment: “Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others’?”
They move the human race forward
This may seem like a stretch, but as I read the book an array of human originals came to mind. People who lived utterly by their own lights, convention be damned. Amanda Palmer. Junko Tabei. Vincent Van Gogh. George Eliot. Diogenes of Sinope. And basically everyone in the Apple “Think Different” commercial.
The psychologist Erich Fromm said that our main task in life is to give birth to ourselves. Some people come by it naturally (my wife is one of those blessed humans). The rest of us schlubs have to struggle against the temptations of distraction or the constrictions of culture or family or faith traditions.
Ultimately, hopefully, we realize no one is going to give us permission to give birth to ourselves except ourselves, and that is the only person whose permission we need.
Good thing there are Stargirls out there to light the way.
Happy reading,
— Jeff
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